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Air Disasters:

An Incorrect Turn Ends in a Deadly Disaster

An Incorrect Turn Ends in a Deadly Disaster

Short | 03:40

It's September 26, 1997 and Garuda Indonesia Flight 152 has just been instructed by air traffic control to turn right onto a vacant runway. Inexplicably, the captain ignores these instructions - with disastrous consequences.

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A routine flight from Jakarta to Medan, Indonesia encounters a very non-routine obstacle: forest fires that are sending a thick blanket of smoke across all of Southeast Asia. But it was a series of avoidable human errors, not a natural disaster, that doomed Garuda Indonesia Flight 152 on September 26, 1997. Discover how an air traffic controller's number mix-up, an incorrect altitude setting, and a wrong turn claimed 234 lives, resulting in the deadliest plane crash in Indonesian history.